Real Estate Agent Marketing

I just got this interesting question in my inbox…

Dustin… are web rings “old school”? Are there blog rings?

Until I got this question I had all but forgotten about webrings… Back in the late 90’s, it was quite popular to join a “web ring” of similar sites.  The end result would be that everyone on the web ring would place a widget that would allow visitors to travel around to different (but similar) sites.

The reality is that web rings are all but dead and have been replaced by two things:

1. Blogs!  Blogs have made is so easy to link to other sites that the idea of sending users to a “random” site just isn’t as appealing as it once *may* have been.
2. Sites like Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon have made it extremely easy to “randomly” find interesting (and much more relevant) articles from around the web on any given topic!

Wow! What a fun day in Pasadena!

We definitely had a full house as approximately 250 people showed up for today’s presentation. Right before the break, I was able to snap this photo of Richard presenting a bit on the Market Snapshot!

Richard Presenting the Market Snapshot.

I also posted a few more photos on Flickr under the Real Estate Gatherings set…

UPDATE:  Cheryl provided a wonderful welcome on her blog for the seminar and Tisza is the first (that I’ve found) to give a review of the presentation!  Thanks to both of you for such kind words!

I’ve heard that Hobbs/Herder have a very good thing going with their seminars for real estate agents, and today their story got picked up by the San Francisco Chron…

Trained as a journalist (she once worked as an editor for SF Gate), the rookie agent with Coldwell Banker isn’t the sort to buy in to just any hard-sell scheme that comes along. Having broken into the ultra-luxury market after only two years in the business, she has experienced the kind of success most agents never achieve even after decades in the trenches. Nevertheless, she found herself tempted when a team from real estate marketing juggernaut Hobbs/Herder descended on her office and began flogging a three-day seminar at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas.

“Their pitch was so good,” she recalls. “The woman said, ‘You can’t swing a dead cat in this town without hitting a real estate agent.’ She’s right. And I thought, ‘Sure, I want to take my business to the next level.’ You know you’re being suckered and yet you sign up for it.”

With so much competition for agents attention on the seminar circuit, I can’t help but wonder how much is buzz and how much is good information. I hope the blogger challenge helps us separate the good from the bad…

I’m looking for one real estate agent to join me in my quest to coach an agent to online success!    Seminar participants are definitely encouraged!

A seminar participant emailed me a while back with a great set of questions…

Once I have a basic blog, how could I promote it and get meaningful participation and really build a community? Even more importantly, what if I’m not in Seattle, one of the most wired/connected places in the world, and my local area is a little further down on the technology-adoption curve? (I’m in the Central Valley of California: Modesto/Turlock to be exact). How would I get people to help build an online community in this type of scenario? If you have any insights or resources you could point me to, I would appreciate it.

A wish I could answer this question in two or three easy tips because this is definitely the most common type of question that I get.  However, that is just not possible.  There is no doubt in my mind that I was in the right-place, right time two years ago when I started the real estate blog in Seattle.  Nonetheless, I do think that creating a community with real value is possible, even in a less tech-savvy area like Modesto.   (You’re really not that far from the tech mecca of the Bay Area, so I’m sure that you have it better in terms of an audience than most!).

The first thing to do is start writing about what interests you… If you’re not interested in what you’re writing, but just there to attract the search engine’s attention, then it will show and it will be very difficult to build a community.

With that said, I’m less fond of relying on just being an “interesting” person or blogger. My mother (who is pretty savvy in these sorts of things), turned me onto the idea that you need to be “interested” in other people as well.  Figure out what interests the people in your community and develop a real interest in those areas.

It might seem contradictory that I start by saying “write what you are interested in”, and then follow up by saying “become interested in your community”.  However, I’m pretty sure that when you find a topic that really resonates with your local community, you WILL become interested in this topic as well…    There is nothing like positive feedback to keep you learning and posting on a particular topic.

I could go into specifics about what worked for me on building up the Rain City Guide community, but the specifics don’t matter.    Write about the things that interest the community you wish to build and everything else will follow!

… to Hanan for giving some props to the seminar. Not only has Hanan been around real estate blogging longer than just about anyone else, he writes the best link blog on the internet.

Note that the only seminar that is currently available to register is for March 30 in Pasadena, CA.

Here are a couple more blogs created by seminar participants! (I’m watching you guys!)

• Brad McDaniel started the Golden Gate Life… In only a few posts, he’s picked up the habit of being colorful and interesting. Great stuff!
• Sheri Soladar started blogging with a bang. I can tell from her enthusiasm that she is in this blog-thing for the long run!
• The KW ILG Course blog is also up-and-running (and giving credit to my seminar)… but I’m still not sure whose behind it…    Nonetheless, they started early by explaining the feed readers, so I can tell they are moving in the right direction!

Another answer from the inbox:

You may remember that I spoke with you at the break and also afterward primarily about whether to concentrate on my home town of Ferndale or the entire Whatcom County/Bellingham area. My dilemma is that our small town is currently going through a visioning process with community/government involvement not seen before and I’m quite involved, but my desire to market to a larger area seems somewhat of a roadblock. My fear is getting pigeonholed into Ferndale while others capture lucrative business with higher prices homes and business opportunties assocaited with Bellingham and waterfront properties in Whatcom County. I know what your advice was to me, concentrate on one area, but I am wondering if I could get away with a Whatcom County Guide but really concentrate on Ferndale???

You definitely have an interesting question and I know that this one really matters to your business objectives.  However, the reality is that you could almost definitely have a very successful community blog that covered both a local or county issues.   Your success will really depend on how interesting your readers find your information! 

My take is to worry a lot less about the specific “location” and write about what interests you.  If you spend too much time concentrating on the business opportunities of your market, then the way you cover your area will likely suffer and it will show in your traffic numbers (or lack thereof).    The most important thing to remember is to be interesting!

I hope that helps! 

Here are a few more seminar participants that have picked up the blogging habit:

• The people behind the SF Newsletter (hard copy) went digital with the new sfnewsletter blog. There writing experience shows with a great article on some neighborhood changes in SF as well as a huge introductory link from Mike of Altos Research…
• Tyler Wood is all over the Big Bear area (an area with some of the best skiing in Southern California!)
• Khadija Anderson started her RE:Seattle blog with a bang by posting about her experiences moving to Seattle from Los Angeles.

I’m working as quickly as possible to get through my inbox… Here’s another question:

hey Dustin! I’m hard at work on www.CometRealtors.com - have any SEO insight
for db-driven sites? links online?

cheers man - thx for the talk in glendale!

The low hanging fruit with database driven websites is to make sure that the site is optimized for the search engines (SEO) so that they can send you the traffic you deserve!

A little aside before I get into the details. Almost all blog platforms are “database-driven” in that the content for the blogs is stored in a database and output into HTML based on some server calls (no need for the detail). The good news is that if you are using an established blog platform (like Top Producers, Blogger or Wordpress.com), then they will have figured out all the SEO stuff for you. The rest of this post only applies to people with home-grown solutions…

The big picture is that you want to make sure that your URL structure is “human writable”, which just means that it isn’t filled up with a bunch of code (as in “….com?=sear…”). Using redirects built into the “.htaccess” file, it is not too difficult for someone who knows what they are doing to substantially improve the URL structure. In reality, the coding of this is WAY too advanced for this blog, but the concept is very important. By the way, a good “page title” is also important and can really help the search engines to know where to send people on your site. Again, this stuff is not too complicated for coders, but way beyond the scope of this blog.

Beyond that, a great place to start is to make sure the title of your pages are filled with good keywords. However, don’t overdo it. If you write for the search engines, it will show and will scare away readers (the very people you want to link to you!). The reality is that if you are writing about your topic of interest, then the good keywords will flow naturally.

There’s volumes more information available on the SEO blogs, the best of which can be found here: http://www.technorati.com/blogs/seo. In particular, Matt Cutts is a Google employee who writes a top-notch blog on SEO.